Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/105

Rh 'She has evidently to count her shillings.'

'Well, if she had been bad she'd be rich,' Chilver returned after another silence. 'So what more do you want?'

'Nothing. Nothing,' Braddle repeated.

'Good-bye, then.'

'Good-bye.'

On which the elder man had taken leave; so that what was inevitably to follow had to wait for their next meeting. Mrs. Damerel's victim betrayed on this second occasion still more markedly the state of a worried man, and his friend measured his unrest by his obvious need of a patient ear, a need with which Chilver's own nature, this interlocutor felt, would not in the same conditions have been acquainted. Even while he wondered, however, at the freedom his visitor used, Chilver recognised that had it been a case of more or less fatuous happiness Braddle would probably have kept the matter to himself. His host made the reflection that he, on the other hand, might have babbled about a confidence, but would never have opened his mouth about a fear. Braddle's fear, like many fears, had a considerable queerness, and Chilver, in presence of it and even before a full glimpse, had begun to describe it to himself as a fixed idea. It was as if according to Braddle, there had been something in Mrs. Damerel's history that she ought really to have told a fellow before letting him in so far.

'But how far?'

'Why, hang it, I'd marry her to-morrow.'

Chilver waited a moment. 'Is what you mean that she'd marry you?'

'Yes, blest if I don't believe she certainly would.'

'You mean if you'd let her off?'

'Yes,' Braddle concurred; 'the obligation of letting me know the particular thing that, whatever it is, right or wrong, I've somehow got it so tormentingly into my head that she keeps back.'